Vox Sentences: A Nigerian president lost reelection for the first time ever

1. "A former military ruler and a converted democrat"

Nigerian president-elect Mohammadu Buhari raises his fist after registering to vote on March 28, 2015. (Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images)

• Muhammadu Buhari — who ruled Nigeria as a military dictator from January 1984 to August 1985 — has defeated President Goodluck Jonathan in the country's presidential elections.

  [BBC]

• This makes Jonathan the first Nigerian president to ever lose power through an election, rather than a coup, and marks the end of the 16-year rule of his People's Democratic Party.

  [Vox / Katy Lee]

• The race was characterized by voter dissatisfaction with government corruption, growing inequality, and Boko Haram's brutal insurgency in the north of the country.

  [NYT / Adam Nossiter]

• There are some concerns about violence after the elections — according to Human Rights Watch, over 800 people died in violence after Buhari lost to Jonathan in 2011 — but Jonathan apparently conceded to Buhari, which hopefully lessens the risk.

  [WSJ / Patrick McGroarty and Heidi Vogt]

• When he was dictator 30 years ago, Buhari "imprisoned journalists and opposition activists without trial, executed drug traffickers by firing squad and ordered soldiers to thrash those who failed to queue in an orderly fashion at bus stops."

  [Reuters / Tim Cocks]

• But he's tried to abandon that reputation, telling voters, "Before you is a former military ruler and a converted democrat who is ready to operate under democratic norms and is subjecting himself to the rigours of democratic elections for the fourth time."

  [The Guardian / David Smith]

• Buhari has promised to implement universal health care, which skeptics believe is unrealistic.

  [AP]

• On the campaign trail, he claimed that Jonathan left the military underresourced and ill-equipped to fight Boko Haram, and cited his own military background as evidence he'd do better.

  [The Guardian / Julian Borger]

• In the past, Buhari — who is Muslim, while Jonathan is Christian — suggested he'd support implementing Islamic Sharia law across the country, rather than just in Muslim-majority regions, though he's downplayed these comments in this campaign.

  [The Guardian / David Smith]

• Buhari's base is in the north, while Jonathan's was in the Christian-majority south; southern Christians have held the presidency for 13 of the last 16 years, contributing to a sense in the north that it was time for one of their own to take office.

  [Vox / Katy Lee]

2. RFRA mania

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence does not look happy to be conducting this press conference. (Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images)

• Amid controversy over a similar law in Indiana, Arkansas's state legislature has passed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), sending it on to Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) who is expected to sign it.

  [NYT / Campbell Robertson and Richard Pérez-Peña]

• The backlash in Indiana has spurred Gov. Mike Pence (R) to call for the legislature to amend the act to clarify that it can't be used to defend people who are being sued for discrimination.

  [Indianapolis Star / Tony Cook and Tim Evans]

• Texas's RFRA has a similar provision, stating that it doesn't exempt religious people from anti-discrimination laws.

  [ThinkProgress / Ian Millhiser]

• Republican leaders in Indiana's state legislature say they're working on a fix.

  [Indianapolis Star / Tony Cook and Tom LoBianco]

• But Democrats in Indiana are calling for outright repeal, saying anything less won't do.

  [Indianapolis Star / Tony Cook]

• Pence and the Republican legislature are highly unlikely to approve a law banning anti-gay discrimination, which pro-LGBT, anti-RFRA activists are also demanding.

  [ACLU of Indiana]

• Arkansas legislators don't seem interested in any kind of fix, with State Sen. Bart Hester (R) saying, "If you start shaving out exemptions in laws, next thing you know, you’ll gut the law because everyone will want an exemption."

  [NYT / Campbell Robertson and Richard Pérez-Peña]

• There haven't been any cases to date in which discrimination laws were trumped by a state or federal RFRA, University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock notes in an interview.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• That seems to be the consensus view among most legal scholars: the Indiana RFRA won't enable discrimination, even though the religious right has tried to sell its base on the idea that RFRA laws will help fight the march of gay rights.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

3. Twenty-two down, tens of thousands to go

Jessica Brown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, holds a sign during an anti-drug war rally June 17, 2013 at the Lafayette Park in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

• President Obama has commuted the sentences of 22 nonviolent drug offenders currently in federal prison.

  [Bloomberg / Justin Sink]

• That more than doubles the total number of commutations in Obama's presidency; before this, he'd only commuted 21 sentences.

  [White House / Neil Eggleston]

• Even before this, Obama was ahead of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan on commutations, but he still lags on pardons.

  [ProPublica / Theodoric Meyer]

• It's hard to get an exact estimate of how many people are in federal prison for nonviolent drug crimes, but when the US Sentencing Commission announced last year that nonviolent drug offenders were eligible for sentence reductions, it estimated that 46,290 prisoners were eligible.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• This all raises the question of why Obama hasn't considered a more expansive set of commutations for nonviolent drug offenders.

• Even if he did, though, most prisoners are in state prison, beyond his reach, and the biggest group in state prisons are violent offenders.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• That suggests we might want to consider reforms that shorten sentences on violent offenders — or reclassify some offenses as nonviolent.

  [Slate / Leon Neyfakh]

4. Misc.

• Todd VanDerWerff's Fast & Furious explainer is an epic achievement, and you should read it right now.

  [Vox / Todd VanDerWerff]

• Millennials are having less sex than the generation before them, presumably because they're the worst.

  [New Republic / Sarah Kollmorgen]

• This is technically a cookbook review but really it's a brilliant treatise on friendship, adulthood, femininity, identity, and above, all Taylor Swift.

  [Eater / Helen Rosner]

• Sending more people to college would raise wages — but it wouldn't fix inequality.

  [NYT / Neil Irwin]

• A comparison of alcoholism treatments found that Alcoholics Anonymous ranked 38th out of 48. So why is it still the dominant model?

  [The Atlantic / Gabrielle Glaser]

• Jon Bois has created a text-based game simulating the life and times of New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. It is hard. You will lose.

  [SB Nation / Jon Bois]

5. Verbatim

• "Frankly, one newspaper here in Nevada kept beating up on me and I said, 'I'm not going to let the bastards beat me,' and so I decided to run a last time."

  [Harry Reid to CNN / Dana Bash]

• "If you took out nationalism and people's testicles, you would look at the centrifuge program and be like, 'Ah, this is really expensive and causes us a lot of anxiety, do we really need to be doing this?' And the answer would be, 'No.'"

  [Jeffrey Lewis to Vox / Max Fisher]

• "My great ambition is to be in a Fast and Furious movie."

  [Dame Helen Mirren to Yahoo! Movies / Jordan Zakarin]

• "There are 731,200 people inside American jails — substantially more than the population of Washington, DC — and three out of five of those inmates have not been convicted of anything at all."

  [The Week / Ryan Cooper]

• "As a socialist, do you really prefer the idea of champagne capitalists? Champagne fascists?"

  [The Tab / Finn McRedmond]

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